Authors: John R. Maxim
The question angered Fallon. “You're asking can he
pay his bill? Black man in a wrinkled suit?”
The doctor peered over his glasses. A hard stare. “I'm
a doctor, Fallon. I don't give a shit if he's Magic Johnson. But two scars from bullet wounds make me wonder about
his medical history.”
Michael blinked. “He's been shot?”
“Not lately. They're old or I'd have called the cops.”
Fallon was surprised and he wasn't. The
wonder, if any
thing, was that Moon lived this long getting shot only
twice.
“Either way,” he told Berman, ”I want him to have
the best. Believe me, he can afford it.”
The doctor tossed a hand. “You want to talk money? Cashier's one flight up. You want to talk about the patient,
call me when you're ready.”
“I'm
...
a little upset.”
“As it happens, so am I. It's not a stroke. Not this
time.”
“What, then?”
“If I had to put money? I'd say he's been poisoned.”
Moon heard her enter.
He opened his eyes. It took them a moment to focus.
She had closed the door behind her but did not approach
the bed. From the look on her face, thought Moon, she
was not here to comfort the sick. The boat girl didn't like
him one bit.
“Last night,” he said, “back by that ferry. That was
you.”
She did not respond.
“Been talking to Michael. He says you're special. How
special are you, Miss Cole?”
Still nothing.
Moon wasn't sure she was afraid of him, exactly. Some,
maybe, when she first walked in with Michael. But now, right here, it was more like she hated that he'd come back
into Michael's life.
“My grandma . . . back home . . . she was special,
too,” he told her. “Women with the gift . . . they called them granny women back then.”
Her little chest rose and fell.
“Speak your mind, miss,” he said gently.
She ran her tongue across her lips. ”I want to touch you. Will you let me?”
Moon grunted. He wanted to say he'd been asked that
friendlier. But his grandma wasn't much on small talk
either.
“Will you?”
“Yes, Miss Cole. If that will ease you.”
He offered his left hand, the one free of tubes. She
moved closer to the bed and took it. Then she cocked one
ear like his grandma did except Grandma Lucy would hum
and rock. What Grandma did
not
do, and this one did,
was to take the hand and hold it flush
against her
heart.
Whatever she heard, it seemed to confuse her. She tried
harder. She took to massaging the back of his hand, run
ning fingertips up and down his arm unmindful, it seemed,
that he was still attached to it. Moon wanted to pull away
lest Michael walk in. But suddenly she broke off, took
two steps back. In that second, the door slapped open and
a nurse, not Michael, came in. Moon hadn't heard her
coming. This girl had, though.
The nurse said, “How we doing?” She replaced the
glucose with a plasma bottle, checked the drip rate, then
the tube in Moon's arm. The bruise around the needle, he
saw, was still spreading. The nurse studied it for a mo
ment, then she patted his thigh and left. The boat girl
stood feeling her throat on the spot where his hand had
touched her. She took another step back.
“You're not his friend,” she said quietly, glaring.
He took a breath. ”I think you know better.”
”I know you've lied to him. You've kept things from
him.”
He nodded. ”A friend will do that sometimes.”
“And you've taken things from him. You took Bron—”
She stopped herself.
Moon squinted. “Did you start to say Bronwyn?”
Her face showed confusion again. Whatever she was
seeing, she seemed unsure of what it meant. Moon tried
to regain the advantage.
“My turn, Miss Cole. You been in prison?”
A beat. Some color drained. She shook her head.
“People who've done time
...
there's a look. You
have that look.”
“The answer is no, Mr. Mullen.”
He shrugged and gave a nod as if satisfied. He wasn't.
There's a yes, a no, and there's an in between. Of the
three, the no seemed farthest from the truth. But now her
chin was coming up. She knew that he had broken her
rhythm and she's about to come charging right back.
“You murder people, don't you, Mr. Mullen?”
Moon wasn't quite ready for that one. Did she think,
for some reason, he killed Bronwyn? Or had she been
listening to stories.
“Something Michael told you?” he asked.
A small shrug. Defiant. He knew then that it hadn't
come from Michael but she had him off balance. Pictures
were coming into his head that he didn't want there now
or ever.
The first was of the grave, the grave in Westchester that
he'd dug for Rasmussen. He saw himself coming back to
it, not that night but the next. He could smell a woman's
hair through the bundle he was carrying. He could hear
himself talking to her, saying he's sorry, saying everyone's
so sorry, as he lowered Annie Fallo
n
down.
He tried to wash the scene away before Megan could
see it too. In its place he put other scenes, other dead
men. The man in Doyle's office, the man in Palm Beach and the German, years ago, named Brunner. He showed
her Brunner, sprawled out on a lawn, his eyes swollen
shut, his jaw hanging crooked, his head half twisted off.
Yes, I did that, he said in his mind. Yes, you could say I'm a murderer.
But the girl, he realized, was seeing none of what he
tried to show her. Her eyes, like his grandma's when she saw deep inside, were shiny and full of pain. In that in
stant, he knew that she knew.
“Miss Cole . . . sometimes . . .” He began but
couldn't finish.
She nodded, near to tears. The nod said he needn't
explain.
Moon tried to say it all the same. He said, “Some
times there's . . .”
She finished for him.
“There's an in-between. I know.”
“He's got blood in his urine,” said the internist named Berman, “some in his stomach and he's bruising badly
.
I
think it's these.”
He produced an amber-colored prescription bottle from
his pocket. Michael read the label. The drug was Warfarin,
a blood-thinner. It came from a pharmacy in Brooklyn.
“This is dated yesterday,” said Michael.
“Lucky him,” the doctor replied. “Warfarin's
an
anti
coagulant. In stroke patients, it keeps the—”
”I know what it is. I was in the business.”
Berman raised an eyebrow. He thumbed the bottle open
and sprinkled a few on his palm. “Do you know it when
you see it?”
Michael looked. “You're saying those are fake?”
”I didn't. But it's interesting you'd ask.”
“I've just been hearing about fakes. What's wrong
with these?”
“Color's off, for one. In this particular brand, a seven-
and-a-half-milligram pill should be beige. These are closer
to yellow. I'm having them analyzed but I know what
we'll find because I've seen these before.”
Michael only half listened as Berman told him about Warfarin in general. That even well made, it's tricky stuff.
That there are more ways for this drug to interact with
other drugs, other physical conditions, with fatal hemor
rhage a result, than almost any other drug on the market.
Michael knew all that.
He was more attentive when Berman spoke of the last
bad batch he had analyzed.
“In a given tablet,” he told Michael, “the amount of
actual Warfarin was found to range from zero, which lets the clots happen, to twenty milligrams, which can kill you
in another way. Worse, the pills in that batch were contam
inated. Whoever made them ground up a lot of other cheap
drugs, almost all of which interact badly with Warfarin.
For a binder, they must have run out of French chalk.
That batch used plaster of Paris. Whoever made it didn't
even pretend to try.”
Michael stared at the bottle. He now understood what
Megan had meant when she said she saw many people
dead. People who were poisoned.
“Were they ever traced?” he asked Berman.
“Not so anyone could prove. Who'd you say you
were with?”
“Was
with. I
...
did some work for AdChem.”
Berman almost sneered. “Small world, Mr. Fallon,”
he said.
Michael still needed to call Doyle. But seeing the empty
bench, he walked back to the treatment room to see
whether Megan had left after all. She was in there with
Moon. He saw odd looks on their faces and that Megan
had been crying.